New Review is a frank admission that all is not well in the NHS and that substandard care is still common place

Last June, six senior NHS professionals, including myself, met Jeremy Hunt to relate our personal histories and petition him for a public inquiry into whistleblower victimisation. We had all suffered extreme retaliation after raising serious concerns about patient care. Five of us had been dismissed. A week later Jeremy Hunt, health secretary, commissioned Sir Robert Francis to conduct a review into creating an open and honest reporting culture in the NHS. For Francis this is unfinished business from his earlier inquiries at Mid Staffordshire Foundation Trust, as he told us with some passion at our first meeting. At Mid Staffs he found it necessary to have clandestine meetings with staff after guaranteeing their anonymity. “People were just scared,” he told us.

The scope of the review was unsatisfactory. Historic cases would not be reopened or adjudicated. The review team was small and the timescale too short, we thought, to cope with the submissions we anticipated. We may have been naïve but decided to trust Francis that this could at least be a step to a full public inquiry. He reassured us that this had definitely not been ruled out.